BitTorrent

Over the past couple of weeks, two of the largest torrent sites on the Internet shut down. After KickassTorrents was shut down by the U.S. Government, meta-search engine Torrentz.eu also said farewell yesterday. Looking back over the years, they are not the only torrent giants to have fallen.
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For those, who are tired to download fakes, spam, virus infected, password protected or incomplete torrents, I've created a list of free torrent sites that provide download for verified files only. All these sites are open for all, public and do not require registration.
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The number of illicit digital copies is not as high as reported by industry trade organizations, according to a large-scale analysis of BitTorrent file-sharing of videogames.

Anders Drachen from the Department of Communication and Psychology at Aalborg University and the PLAIT Lab at Northeastern University as well as Robert Veitch from the Department of IT Management at Copenhagen Business School analysed a the filesharing of some 173 computer games over a three-month period between 2010 and 2011.

They set out to study videogame piracy because "despite the substantial debate about digital game piracy, there is minimal objective information available about the relative magnitude of piracy, or its distribution across different countries nor across game titles or game genres"
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ThePirateBay, which has seen it’s share of the spotlight in the past, has had consistent pressure on their domains once again in recent days. Since TPB first opened doors they have had nearly 20 different domain extensions. In the past 2 days alone, TPB has gone from .sx, to .ac to .pe. The .SX belonging to the tiny island of Sint Maarten, .ac belonging to the UK’s Ascension Island and .pe belong to Peru. The most recent .pe domain will only be a temporary solution as Peru authorities will be soon to seize this domain as well. As a result ThePirateBay will move to a new extension shortly. If they were able to acquire thepiratebay.so or thepiratebay.ag it would be ideal. These are two of the safest locations (Angola & Burma or Somalia) to register domains and it would make sense if the ship attempted to sail there.
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BitTorrent is without a doubt the best way to share large files online. Bram Cohen, BitTorrent’s inventor recently found out that torrents with more peers are not always quicker.

We have written many articles on how BitTorrent users can speed up their downloads in the past. We have focused on tweaking the client’s options such as the max upload speed and the maximum number of incoming and outgoing connections. Tweaking your client can indeed help with speeding up your downloads but many BitTorrent users are looking for the holy grail that will boost their download speeds to the maximum. Picking the right torrent is one of the most important part and the torrents with the most peers are not always the fastest one.
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The Pirate Bay owners announced the release of new browser that was created for everyone who wishes to avoid censorship from his Internet Service Provider.

New PirateBrowser is a bundle package that can be configured to circumvent the blockade for torrent sites launched in countries such as Iran, North Korea, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland.
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Up to $750 million in damages from Canada-based torrent site isoHunt is the price that The MPAA is hoping to receive. The movie studio group thinks that this will make others think twice before they start a similar website.

IsoHunt and the MPAA have been battling it out in court for more than seven years and it’s still not over. The case now moves towards a trial from which the movie industry hopes to win a substantial sum in statutory damages, after the 2010 District Court ruling against the torrent site was affirmed earlier this year. How much compensation they’re aiming for, and how they hope to convince the jury was explained in the recent hearing from MPAA lawyer Steven Fabrizio.
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Below is the list of best five search engines for torrents. All sites provide easy search through various trackers and torrent sites at once with just few clicks. I sorted my list by quality and not by popularity.
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Company BitTorrent Inc. - developer of the most popular Bittorrent client uTorrent - launched a new file-sharing related project. The new service got a name "SoShare" and was released on February 15th.

SoShare is a new service for sharing of files online. It focuses on online users, who need to send and receive large amounts of data regularly. It's rather inconvenient to send large files by e-mail or use a cloud storage because of their limitations. The new SoShare should help users to transfer large files without size and speed limits.

The new service is a development of BitTorrent Labs department. It uses a cloud-caching principle and it is easy to guess that the technology is based on Bittorrent protocol. The main advantage of it is that the data recipient will be able to access files of the sender even if his computer is turned off.
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Bittorrent Inc., the developer of Bittorrent protocol technology, launched new format of torrent files to give copyright holders the opportunity to earn money on their content.

Bittorrent – the most popular Peer-2-Peer network to share files online generates today more than three percent of global Internet traffic. Millions of fans use torrents daily. With the new format “Bundle” Bittorrent is trying to improve their negative reputation because of huge amount of pirated content that is available in this network.

Bittorrent Bundle allows the copyrighters to embed into the torrent file a new feature called "wall", which requires a user to take some action before downloading the content. The action could be an invitation for the users to pay a fixed sum, to make a donation, to sign up for email newsletter or to make a Like on Facebook. After successful action the file can be accessed. Otherwise, Bittorrent Bundle works in the same way as the usual "torrents" and it can spread content through the existing infrastructure.
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The company BitTorrent – developer of the popular torrent client uTorrent – released a client Sync for the Android operating system. The new program enables secure synchronization of files between devices and is available for smartphones and tablets.

The principle of working of BitTorrent Sync is the same as that of Dropbox, Google Drive or “Yandex.Disk": the user himself creates a "magic" folder that can be accessed from any device connected to the Internet. The new service has a number of notable advantages over other "cloud" systems.
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This week Netflix rolled out its video streaming service in the Netherlands where it hopes to build a massive user base in the years to come. One of the keys to achieve this goal is getting the rights to the most popular movies and TV-shows, and this is where pirate sites come in. Netflix Vice President of Content Acquisition Kelly Merryman says that popularity on file-sharing platforms determines in part what TV-series the company buys.
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